You have to keep up a large staff of writers, who make out invoices and accounts, and keep the books.  Your correspondence alone is enough work for one man, and you have to tally bags, count coolies, see them paid their daily wage, attend to lawsuits that may be going on, and yet find time to superintend the operations of the farm, and keep an eye to your rents and revenues from the villages.  It is a busy, an anxious time.  You have a vast responsibility on your shoulders, and when one takes into consideration the climate you have to contend with, the home comforts and domestic joys you have to do without, the constant tension of mind and irritation of body from dust, heat, insects, lies, bribery, robbers, and villany of every description, that meets you on all hands, it must be allowed that a planter at such a time has no easy life.

The time at which you despatch the seed is also the very time when you are preparing your land for spring sowings.  This requires almost as much surveillance as the seed-buying and despatching.  You have not a moment you can call your own.  If you had subordinates you could trust, who would be faithful and honest, you could safely leave part of the work to them, but from very sad experience I have found that trusting to a native is trusting to a very rotten stick.  They are certainly not all bad, but there are just enough exceptions to prove the rule.

One peculiar custom prevailed in this border district of North Bhaugulpore, which I have not observed elsewhere.  At the beginning of the financial year, when the accounts of the past season had all been made up and arranged, and the collection of the rents for the new year was beginning, the planters and Zemindars held what was called the Pooneah.  It is customary for all cultivators and tenants to pay a proportion of their rent in advance.  The Pooneah might therefore be called ‘rent-day.’  A similar day is set apart for the same purpose in Tirhoot, called tousee or collections, but it is not attended by the same ceremonious observances, and quaint customs, as attach to the Pooneah on the border land.

When every man’s account has been made up and checked by the books, the Pooneah day is fixed on.  Invitations are sent to all your neighbouring friends, who look forward to each other’s annual Pooneah as a great gala day.  In North Bhaugulpore and Purneah, nearly all the planters and English-speaking population belong to old families who have been born in the district, and have settled and lived there long before the days of quick communication with home.  Their rule among their dependants is patriarchal.  Everyone is known among the natives, who have seen him since his birth living amongst them, by some pet name.  The old men of the villages remember his father and his father’s father, the younger villagers have had him pointed out to them on their visits to the factory as ‘Willie Baba,’ ‘Freddy Baba,’ or whatever his boyish